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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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hello i'm ben luke and welcome to a brush with the podcast from the art newspaper in which i talk to artists about their influences from writers to musicians and of course other artists and the cultural experiences that have shaped their lives and work and this episode is a brush with anna imhoff who's primarily known for her epic durational performances involving diverse collectives of dancers musicians and actors
Their movement, speech and song is built from often fragmentary gestures and informed by a wealth of sources as well as the innate expertise of the performers themselves, which Anna harnesses to choreograph tableaux of rich affective power.
A reflection on and of contemporary societal conditions, these works are also profoundly engaged with cultural and performance traditions, from the languages and forms of contemporary dance and ballet to rock concerts and to art history. and Anna's practice extends far beyond performance, involving painting and drawing, sculpture and sculptural installation, and film.
In each language that she adopts, Anna overtly engages her audience, and particularly their bodies, whether that's in the mode of address of her performance works, in sculptures that evoke barriers or surveillance mechanisms, or in paintings that overwhelm the viewer in their scale and the gravity of their imagery.
Anna was born in 1978 in Gießen in Germany and today lives between Berlin and New York. She studied first at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach in Germany between 2000 and 2003 but it was outside of the art school that the formative events that shaped her practice took place. She became part of the club and music scene in Offenbach
and even worked as a bouncer at a local club called Robert Johnson, where the piece that's regarded as her first major statement took place. Duel from 2001 consisted of a characteristically dramatic playoff between two disciplines, boxing and music.
Other early works include videos in which Anna is the protagonist, like Maria from 2002, in which she films herself performing to camera while fragments of the soundtrack to West Side Story play in the background.
Later, Anna attended the influential art school the Städelschule in Frankfurt, where she shaped her art practice while preserving the urgency and intensity of the Frankfurt music scene. Her first major institutional exhibition was at the Porticus in Frankfurt, and features videos relating to live works.
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Chapter 2: What influences have shaped Anne Imhof's artistic practice?
Angst was quickly followed by Faust, a pivotal piece made for the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2017, which won the Biennale's Golden Lion for Best Pavilion. It again featured a collective performance, this time in a construction of glass walls, floors and ceilings,
on around and under which performers were visible for the full seven months of the biennale in modes ranging from just hanging out to apparently masturbating and performing songs the piece met its moment and seemed dramatically suited to the era of disaffection among young people marked by extreme wealth inequality and social division as right-wing and far-right movements like brexit in the uk and the donald trump presidency in the us marked global power shifts
Faust was billed by the pavilion organizers as evoking, quote, various constructions of power and powerlessness, capriciousness and violence, resistance and freedom, and much of it was captured in a deluge of social media commentary and documentation by its viewers.
Faust marked a turning point, and ever since, Anna has been at the forefront of developments in contemporary art, creating ever more ambitious presentations for international museums and spaces.
Among them were the works Sex from 2019 for the Tanks at Tate Modern, Nature Morte for the Palais de Tokyo in Paris from 2021, the exhibition Wish You Were Gay at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria in 2024, and in 2025, Doom, House of Hope at the Park Avenue Armory in New York.
This latest opus featured Mon 60 performers across three hours and included passages of dance including ballet and flexing, a reverse telling of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and 20 Cadillac cars which became a form of stage or platform for the performers.
Also present were barriers like those used to contain crowds at concerts, which have become a significant sculptural form for Anna in her museum installations. Indeed, her sculptural practice has hugely expanded. She makes figurative bronze reliefs that evoke classical sculpture, but subvert the scale and composition so that the figure's hands are vastly expanded.
and seem to reorientate the agency of the female figures depicted. She's also made her first public sculpture for her 2025 exhibition at the Soralves Museum in Porto in Portugal.
Stalbard from 2025 is a huge outdoor swimming pool made in black steel located in an inaccessible courtyard and behind a barrier inspired by the derelict pool at Pripyat, the modernist Soviet city that was deserted after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. As such, it's defiantly anti-monumental, despite its scale.
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Chapter 3: How does Anne Imhof incorporate movement and collaboration in her performances?
And mostly it is the movement of audience members. It is where our open space is created in the part of the pieces that are where everybody is together in one space and the viewer can go wherever they want. And performers have certain places where they perform or where they go to or like a certain trajectory that they follow. So in these moments, it's very palpable how things shift and change.
In the more rigid structures, like in Doom, the third act was a ballet. And in the ballet, things were way more structured because the music and the movement were so closely connected to each other that it had to be like it. But still, every of them has the agency because they're the ones who are performing in the end. It's not me. And that's a big part of the work, I guess.
And a big part of the magic, right? Because if the magic is to happen, what you're doing is entering into a world full of risk. It's also a world full of trust, it seems to me. So you're collaborators and you must have a tremendous balance of trust with each other. So in other words, they know that you're directing them in a way that they can create the magic.
So you know that they are performing in a way that can create the magic, if you like.
I am a big believer in that the more agency, the better a person can be the best they can with their skills that they have. So in some ways, like a ballet dancer has a career of like 10 to 20 years has a whole different world that they can draw from than I have. And we know about this.
But like people say, I'm good at this to bring the best out of people and make them like have access to the excellence in the moment of performing. I'm not so sure if that's like kind of a method or something. I think it's like, it's the way of working that I propose off stage that then is projected on stage.
So I think the way of working that I think my ability to create work or to create movement and the ability of... the dancer who is actually the expert in how to execute the movements. It's like kind of that's key. And the space that is given to this performer is key. And if I choose a person to work with, I already know
that the synergy in between me and that performer is like pretty good and or they are an exceptional addition to a group of people that I chose beforehand. So there is like a way of like doing auditions that is on the one way. I choose a performer, but the person has to consent to that too. So it's almost like a reciprocal choosing.
Yeah.
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Chapter 4: What role does improvisation play in Anne Imhof's work?
It's interesting that you pointed out that there is a narrative and it came from like almost my thinking about movement as a complete standstill until where I'm now moving a lot, moving a lot to music, falling in love with this rigid form that classical ballet is like. And of course, I have been seeing a lot of different works throughout the years.
So that's like, I think also what speaks to you in certain times is really important that you let it like come closer, I think, without like blocking it off because you're afraid of it. I was always afraid of storytelling.
Well, let's move on to the questions that we ask all our guests. Who was the first artist whose work you loved?
Of course, I could say the first artist whose work I loved was Tino Segal or like was Andy Warhol because it would fit very well, right? Especially the Velvet Underground. It was almost like kind of the players or the... The whole scene. Yeah, that intrigued me, the collectiveness of it. And I think also the queerness of it in the first place that made me drawn to it. Or, for example, Basquiat.
I mentioned that and it may seem odd on first glance, but then if I see him working in a studio or certain interviews, like I feel very kin to the way he was portrayed. working, like the way he was behaving in the studio.
I can relate to that so strongly, like how you get yourself into a state where you're in the flow and working on 10 things at the same time and have constant images coming through you that you... trying to get somewhere, like sometimes impatiently, sometimes like it's just good. And sometimes it's horrifying.
So this like kind of tornness of an artist in between worlds and in between feelings and states, I can very well relate to. But then which artists really inspired me at first, like my piano teacher, maybe who were like, who was also a performer who I saw both like teaching me and then performing on stage. She was American. It was like in the part of Germany I grew up.
She was the first one who like saw like my drawings lying around on the staircase in my parents' house. And she was like, what's this? Like, are you doing this? Like I was like eight or nine or something. And then it made me think maybe it's the artists that inspire you the most is not the artists you see, but it's the artists that see you.
And there are people that I think on my way saw me, like it was Tino for sure, who was a big mentor for me. And then Bill Forsythe, the same. He was closer than other artists. And so I think this is very important to distinguish that and on the same way, it might be the same importance.
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Chapter 5: How does Anne Imhof's background in drawing inform her art?
Well, quite apart from anything else, there's an enormous amount of architecture and sculpture in Faust. You know, actually, a lot of the dynamics of that work were as a result as much of the structure you had built, the physical structure you built, as the performance structures that you built. And the two were utterly interrelated again.
It's always like the architecture versus sculpture aspect that's interesting to me. I think for my work especially, it doesn't count as for works of, for example, Joseph Beuys that he touches with his sacred manly hands and then it becomes suddenly something more worth than the other thing that sits right next to it. that hasn't been touched.
And I think in my work, it's not like this because the artist's touch is not really there because it's other people performing in my work. And it has a different logic. It has more the logic of dance and a dance performance than it has. And then the sculpture of a glass floor that would be another artist's oeuvre, a sculptural piece is in my oeuvre as the stage.
And so I think this is like why maybe as like a person growing up, I was always like scared of being fixed. Like maybe it's like almost like kind of being a queer person and always wanting to not be like described. Like as that or the other, as my gender not to be described. Or I couldn't describe it myself. Maybe that was also it. I couldn't give the people what they wanted it to be.
And it was almost like kind of a pain that was in there. Like in terms of the description, I think in art, it sometimes feels the same way.
You've already mentioned a couple, but which contemporary artist do you most admire?
There's almost every artist that's not me that I admire because they can do different things than I do. I have different eyes on the world, which is, I think, what's good about art. There are definitely a couple of artists that I admire, especially maybe Cameron Rowland is one of them because he's like...
found a way of being in the commodity culture of the art or in the value system of the art world in a very meaningful way when it comes to his work and what he's talking about in his work. I don't know his oeuvre that well, or I've never really spoken to him personally, but for me, there's something he solved that I'm struggling with.
And that is like making art that derives from heritage or like from your own experience with that work.
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Chapter 6: What significance do animals have in Anne Imhof's performances?
I've never done this before. I've never done a ballet before. It was almost like me on the way of going there thinking like, oh my God, what have you done?
you have said you want to do a ballet and then you're in the middle of it and it's like yeah I've like worked on this all my career realizing this is like a really good experience and I'm so thankful for that and grateful for the people that work with me that make this possible because they're believing in this they believe me like saying I'm doing a ballet and then they're showing up for it which is amazing which museum do you visit most frequently
I think I am lately visiting the Met the most frequently, maybe, even though I often want to see something and I'm wandering around and it's so vast that I almost like have to go out very soon again. This is why I'm going there often because I'm going in and out a lot. And then the new museum is kind of interesting because I actually don't like the new museum.
And I'm surprised so many times by how good it is and how good the programming is, especially the last show. I was like out of my mind about it.
This is called Memories of the Future. Is that the show you mean?
Yeah, exactly. It's also a bit intimidating almost, especially if you're not part of it. And it is like showing how things are interconnected. And I stood at this brink of thinking like, yeah, it's super important. Like how it goes into one narrative and a little bit like feeling I'm not part of this narrative was interesting. Interesting experience. But also I was head over heels about it.
And then I'm going to Frankfurt extra to see shows by Susanne Pfeffer because she's the most extraordinary exhibition maker of our times. She's like maybe the one who I trust the most. having read everything, having tried everything to understand an artist's work and doing the best show.
So I experienced that working with her in my own experience as an artist, but also I see it in the shows and it's like, it's amazing. They're really good.
Which cultural experience changed the way you see the world?
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Chapter 7: How does Anne Imhof engage with the viewer's experience in her art?
There's something about why I use those two composers in Doom that is because they do that with me. With Mahler, I can listen to... Mahler, very different than, for example, with Mozart or Mozart's Requiem that I had this phase before. Actually, the piece you mentioned in the beginning, Sax, that I only listened to that album for a year. It's like the recording of Corinthians.
It's Mozart's Requiem, but it's so fast and so loaded that it always put me in the right place. moment in my head to think about that piece, sax, that I showed at the Tate Modern. And in the end, I was like, what would have happened if I just would have taken this music and made the piece to this music, all the movements? I'm almost like inclined to do it again and put the other music to it.
But then, yeah, that would be like a first for sure, doing a piece again. I'm really excited about this future in front of me that I'm going to make a piece that I can do again and that becomes a repertoire because I'm too sad that this is like kind of this... Wasting away like moments that other people could see.
And I almost find it a bit too exclusive, like saying, okay, this is happening only that moment, that time. And I want to see like what a piece does like a couple of years if like, because they do different things at different times, and then it comes back and then People say, oh, Faust is like dated because it's about social media or whatever, what was at this time in this moment.
But of course, it meant something completely different then and will mean something completely different in 10 years from now that I can't control. And nobody, I think right now, can control where it's going with images and how fast they will move and what they will inform people.
And I think that when it comes to the music that I chose for Doom, it didn't want this moment to be one moment in the piece that is like the existential moment or whatever. So I wanted it to be stretched over the whole duration of the piece. So at the beginning was Bach and then it turned into Mahler's Sixth. And Mahler was eight times slowed down.
And it was lying under the whole other music that came on top of it. which was sometimes tricky because we had to strip the music away from the songs of the participating artists that were their songs and they agreed to it.
And it was interesting how the voices sounded on a Mahler band that made it possible for, for example, a young rapper and poet from Berlin to rap on that in, I think, in four different languages. He raps in Wolof and like
english and french wall offices so it's main or one of the languages and he is like sitting on that as as if it's like meant to be and it was so beautiful to realize that mala's music has this effect that it can like wrap around a whole like story and it seems to be made for it is there a particular discipline in your daily working life that you see as an essential ritual
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